


Syn's Heart

by inthegrayworld



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Amnesia, F/M, Reylo Kids, multiple AUs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-17
Updated: 2018-09-17
Packaged: 2019-07-13 10:57:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16016501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inthegrayworld/pseuds/inthegrayworld
Summary: Rey and Kylo enter a fortress impossibly set in the heart of a black hole, where they find themselves walking through alternate versions of reality, and themselves.





	Syn's Heart

  
i

Where the Outer Rim touches the Unknown Regions is the Syn System, a dark expanse comprised mostly of the debris of crushed planets spread out in rings stretching over lightyears.

At the center is the dark space where the system’s star used to be. It is said that in the early days of the Sith, soon after their separation from the Jedi Order, that the science-magus Sorzus Syn created a bastion inside the gravity well. The purpose of the bastion was unknown, but it was whispered in the Sith tales, and the Jedi texts, that the bastion defied all known understanding of construction and physics.

It was said that the bastion’s perimeter is marked where the light from the nearby stars and planets abruptly disappear.

  
  


ii

It is in that region where two starships leap into real space - the Millennium Falcon, and the TIE Silencer.

For the moment, they are unaware of one another, drifting where the void’s black edges into a deeper, thicker black.

He reaches out and sees that it is less a trap, and more of a puzzle. But when he shuts his eyes and feels, he finds there is something there in the Force - something unseen, massive. Something that makes him think of architecture when the flow of the Dark Side of the Force washes over it.

She feels it as well, eyes also shut, hands still on the Falcon’s controls. If she presses into the gloom, it is as though she can see doorways—tunnels—tucked into the void like passages behind curtains.

Hyperspace lanes, they both think at the same time.

It becomes a question of not how to enter, but which entrance to take.

He falls into the Force, gripping it, willing it to show him the way. She leans into the flow, one hand outstretched, as though she were feeling through delicate silk strands.

_ There _ .

The Falcon and the Silencer breach the event horizon at points several parsecs apart, but emerge together, close enough for the Falcon’s backdraft to brush the Silencer’s wing. Like an electric current suddenly finding a path, they recognize one another’s presence in the Force.

His jaw gnashes shut, lips crumpling, and she finds herself exhaling, “Shit.”

  
  


iii

Neither opens fire. In the face of the obsidian turrets of Syn’s Heart it feels disrespectful.

Instead the Falcon heads down to a landing pad carved into the opened palm of a long-taloned beast, and the Silencer settles near the broad steps leading up to the bastion’s cathedral doors.

He waits for her at the bottom of the staircase, not turning around until he hears the brush of long robes on ancient rock, and her voice. 

“Supreme Leader.”

She looks exactly as she did the day she tried to snatch his grandfather’s saber from his belt. No—not quite. There is a confidence in her walk that wasn’t there before, although the lines under her eyes are deeper, and the scars on her chin are fresh.

He remembers, after a moment, to breathe.

“Master Jedi,” he says.

She almost smiles. “You know why I’m here. I intend on destroying it.”

Kylo bristles. “Not if I take it first.”

They are a moment away from drawing their lightsabers. But from deep within the bastion comes a noise, like a thousand years’ worth of sighs expelled all at once, pushing the great arched doors open on screeching hinges.

For a moment, doubt clouds Rey’s face, and Kylo finds himself suppressing the urge to step back.

“Whatever awaits us in there is better faced together,” Kylo says.

She smirks at that. “Scared to go by yourself?”

“Of course not—” he bursts out but realizes a second too late that his vehemence is just as amusing to her.

The smirk does not leave her face. “I do agree that whatever’s in there is better faced together,” she says.

She faces him, and though her head barely passes his shoulders, he finds it is he who has to turn down to her, not her turning up to him.

“Truce?” she asks.

He knows well enough the capriciousness of a truce. But he nods - it’s better than clasping her hand. He still remembers its warmth after all this time. “Truce,” he says.

  
  


iv

He walks ahead, a sign of trust, she supposes. Rey knows well enough the strength behind the walking storm known as Kylo Ren, but she had that strength fighting alongside her before, had peered into the whirlwind and seen the despair in its eye. She is not afraid of him. But she is suspicious.

The first chamber is a long hall lined with doors, with scratchy markings along the edges. She’s peeked at Luke’s old books enough times to know that these are ancient runes and that she has absolutely no idea how to decipher them.

“What do you know about Syn’s Heart?” Kylo asks her.

“It’s what this place was built to house,” Rey says. “It’s a weapon.”

Silence would be more prudent, she considers. They’re walking side by side now, but he’s still the enemy.

But something akin to a wave washes through them both, so subtle it barely raises the hairs on the back of Rey’s neck. She looks ahead and the thought that he is the enemy has vanished.

In the black hole of Syn’s heart, one reality presses against the next, fabrics caught on the pin tip of the gravity well. The smallest nudge sends the threads of one into the other, sweeping over past and present. What was once the past - one chasing a droid, and the other finding it--a duel in a snowy planet--whispers across the galaxy as one sits in a fire-lit hut, and the other in a cold starship chamber--all fade away, replaced by different stories, different memories.

He is no longer the enemy because he never was, of course not, how could he be?

He looks up, the edges of his lip tipping upwards, in a smile she has learned to miss when she doesn’t see it.

“Not a weapon, sweetheart,” he says. He only ever calls her that when they’re alone. “But an object of great power, yes.”

Rey rolls her eyes. He’s showing off again.

“And now you’re going to tell me why it’s an object of great power.”

He’s doing a slow circuit of the chamber, reading the glyphs on top of the doors. He’s taken out his dataslate, probably consulting one of the thousands of databases he had BB-8 store there. Stars, but she would have concentrated more on Skywalker’s teachings about the ancient Jedi and Sith if she knew he’d be one-upping her every chance he got.

Him. The most vexing man in the galaxy.

“Here,” he points at the holo jutting up from his dataslate, of some stone tablet etched with the same runes. “Sorzus Syn supposedly used the Heart as a focus, to catch a glimpse of the various realities she saw past the singularity.”

“The who did what now with the what?”

This time it’s him who raises an eyebrow.

“This bastion somehow, impossibly, through some bizarre finagling with the Force, sits right on top of a black hole,” he said. “In this place, the walls between realities are softer. Syn thought to study other worlds from this place, for whatever an ancient Sith would like to use that knowledge.”

“Nice,” Rey says. “So we need to get our hands on it before the First Order does.”

He doesn’t respond to that, but his brows knit, and she knows that he’s thinking the same thing she is - of the fall of D’Qar under Supreme Leader Hux’s bombardment, of the mad scramble into the transports, the brief, bloody skirmish with the Knights of Ren.

“Ben,” she says.

He is surprised to find the touch of her cheek at his back, arms around his ribs, fingers interlaced over his heart.

“Rey,” he says back.

“Do you remember what you told me, the first time we met on Jakku?”

“‘I’m not going to hurt you, please stop hitting me with your stick?’”

“The other thing.”

“‘Yes, if you come with me, you’ll get to meet the fabled smuggler Han Solo.’”

She squeezes his ribs hard enough to make him gasp, and he chuckles.

The most vexing man in the galaxy, she thinks again.

He breathes in deep. “I told you that everything will be fine, we just need to trust in the Force, and each other.”

Rey’s grip around him tightens. “That’s what we’re going to do now.”

His fingertips danced over the sand-scoured calluses on her knuckles.

“That’s our way in,” he says, nodding towards one of the doors, a nondescript angular opening in the wall.

Rey gets on her tiptoes, sneaks a kiss to the smooth skin of his cheek.

“Let’s go get this over with,” she says. “The kids won’t forgive us if we get home late.”

  
  


v

They stroll hand in hand into the next chamber, where the quiet gray illumination of the outside is cut away entirely, replaced by cold darkness and the rumble of stone.

Another subtle wave passes through them, unnoticed. Reality shifts inside Syn’s heart, and memories of dark-haired twins leaning their heads against Rey’s shoulders as they drift off to sleep, Ben watching with that look like he’s trying to keep the joy from overwhelming him, begins to vanish. 

Memory becomes dreams, dreams become shadow, and now they both walk from one reality, through the doorway, into another. They find themselves, without noticing that anything has changed, in an entirely different world, one with no room for soft joys.

Rey takes the lead, her black double-bladed saber glinting on the small of her back.

He looks past her, where the floor gives way abruptly to a chasm. Great slabs of stone levitate over the chasm, drifting left to right, up and down, with no clear pattern.

“Well, this is fun,” she says.

“Focus, apprentice,” he snarls. “One wrong move and you go over the edge. Do not expect me to go after you.”

She turns to face him, the meager light catching the gold in her eyes. “It’s apprentice now, is it? What would your grandfather say?”

His lips straighten into a line.

There were only ever two at a time, and Darth Vader had long been his mentor, long before he took on the title of Darth himself. But while Vader was no less powerful in his armor, Kylo had found himself increasingly drawn to the natural endpoint of all bonds between a Sith master and apprentice.

He launches himself off the edge, cape fluttering behind him, cloth smacking rock as he lands on the first slab.

“Just hurry up,” he says, over his shoulder, but the words are barely out of his mouth when she sails above him, landing light as a Loth cat on a slab hovering several feet above his head.

He could not show that he was proud, though the swell of it does rise within him - there is a reason she stood out among the junk traders and scavengers of that forsaken desert planet. Her rage and sorrow had been a molten vein in the Force, one which the smouldering ruin she had left her drunkard parents’ hovel had sharpened into a knife.

“Out of curiosity,” she asked, “What would happen if your dear grandfather were to find out about this little excursion?”

Ah, so all that bravado was a veneer.

“You remember what happened to the last generals of the Rebel Alliance? To the traitors of Inferno Squad? It will be far worse than those.”

Her nose twitches—concern there, the early stirrings of fear—but she dashes to the edge of her slab, leaps, somersaults, springing off the face of a slowly revolving rock, to land a handspan from where he stands. She isn’t even breathing heavily yet.

“And we can’t expect your mother to intervene?”

He grimaces. “As far as the Empress is concerned, if I’m incapable of keeping myself alive, that’s my own fault. She hates me enough for carrying my father’s blood.”

“Well then,” she sticks her chin up. “We better find this fabled weapon, don’t we?”

He puts his gloved hand at the back of her head and pulls her in close, with a heat that surprises her. But she doesn’t turn away. She meets the press of his mouth with that hunger that never seems to abate, and melts into him, as she has countless times before.

It is with some difficulty that he draws back, against the crook of her elbows behind his neck.

“Vader will fall,” Kylo says. “And I shall take his place, and you will take yours, at my side.”

She chews on her lip, biting back a grin. “Until it’s your turn, of course.”

“Apprentice,” he runs his fingers over her face, over the scar he had given her the first time she had thought to take up a lightsaber against him. “You will have to fight very hard to kill me.”

She turns her head to the side, catches his fingers on her lips. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Together they are two black shapes traversing the floating rocks, until they suddenly find that the slabs are growing bigger, and far more stable, knitting together into something that gradually becomes a proper floor again.

  
  


vi

By then, reality had shifted once again, one timeline pulled by the gravity of Syn’s Heart, to break against the other. 

The pair walk out of one lifetime - one where the Empire never fell, and the grip of the Sith never weakened - and into another, without knowing what they’ve gained or lost.

The automaton sits squarely in front of the door leading into the innermost chamber. They had no sooner stepped into the fighting circle when its eyes light up, and it rises onto blocky stone feet, an obsidian weapon at the end of each of its four arms.

Kira, Master of the Knights of Ren, immediately draws her saber, brilliant red shooting out in the cross pattern, but he holds up his hands, puts himself clear in the automaton’s line of sight.

“Don’t!” he yells. “We’re not here to fight!”

It ignores him.  _ Fool _ , she thinks. How he was ever able to defeat her on Starkiller she’d never know.

The giant raised a hammer fist and brings it crashing down. He dodges, rolls to safety, finally drawing his own weapon.

At the same time, she unleashes a battle cry and throws herself at the automaton. There certainly were more elegant ways to take it down. There is no real need to meet its sword hand head on. But it makes made her blood boil, whipping the Force into a cyclone within her. She thrusts her other hand out, and the automaton violently lurches back.

“Look out!” Ben yells, and at the last moment she sees that it has twisted at it fell, its chained mace arm swinging towards her.

She blocks, but the blow’s full force sends her tumbling across the fighting circle.

“Rey!”

She rolls onto her back, biting deeply of the pain that blossoms along the right side of her body, feeding it into the Dark Side of the Force.

“That—” she gasps, “is not my name.”

She forces herself up, to steady herself while he dances circles around the swinging, slashing automaton.

“I don’t have time to argue with you now,” he says, stepping into the guardian’s range to bring his saber down on its axe hand. There is a bubbling of superheated rock, and the axe head falls to the ground.

Kira tears down the pit—drawing the automaton’s gaze. It stabs with its sword hand, but she knows to expect it. She slips to the side by the smallest of hairs, enough to glimpse her own reflection on the mirror-polished stone, and she thrusts her saber clean into the automaton’s eye.

It doesn’t cry out, but sinks to its knees, the rest of its weapons falling to the floor.

He observes the remains, not quite looking at her when he says, “Guess we still make a good team.”

That makes her flinch. The last time they’d fought together had been in the former Supreme Leader’s throne room, over his bisected corpse, cutting down his red-clad guards.

“A good team? Is that what we are?” she snorts. “Ben Solo, I offered you the galaxy. You turned it down.”

Turned me down, she doesn’t say.

But he gives her that look, like he knew precisely what she is thinking. Over the lightyears their minds had touched many times through the Force. It was perfectly possible that he knew what she was thinking.

“It’s not the galaxy I wanted,” he says softly, with those thrice-damned eyes of his. She had seen fear and rage in those eyes, waking up on the interrogation slab to find her standing next to him, and it wasn’t until she had removed her mask that they’d softened, questioned who it was that stood before him. He seems to be asking that same question now.

She refuses to meet his gaze, clipping her saber back to her belt, and stalking past him. She can’t seem to unclench her right hand, the one that had once briefly grazed his.

  
  


vii

In the innermost chamber, a change sweeps through them again. The realities refracted by the grip of Syn’s Heart fall into place, and Rey finds herself to be Rey of Jakku, daughter of no one, while Kylo Ren finds that he is Supreme Leader of the First Order, but somewhere beneath that, Ben Solo.

They stop in their tracks as memories rise up to meet them, rising and crashing down like waves - they first came across one another on Takodana, not in the wastelands of Jakku on a mission for the Resistance, or an Imperial scouting drive. And while the memories of touch linger - his kiss on the base of her ear--her teeth against his shoulder--none of that has ever transpired between them. Nothing, but the ghost of his fingertips against hers, through the Force, while he was on the Supremacy, and she in Ahch-To. 

“Did you see that?” she asks, paling. “All—that?”

Her fingers are trembling as he nods, slowly.

“It’s a trick,” Kylo says. The weapon in the center of Syn’s Heart lies on a pedestal in the middle of the chamber, otherwise bare of anything else. It looks remarkably like Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber, that formerly belonged to Anakin.

“Of all the forms it could have taken, why that lightsaber?” Rey asks, though they both have an inkling.

The last time they both stood before that saber, reality had pulled taut. Through the fabric of it, one might have spied any number of paths, of futures. But a choice was made, and past and present knit together, forming a singular tapestry carrying Rey and Kylo down the path that belonged to them alone.

“Will you fight me?” Rey asks.

His hand tightens into a fist.

But he reaches out, and at the same moment she does too. The Force screams between them, the Heart lifting upwards, caught in stasis between his pull and hers.

She refuses to relinquish her hold—but as she hangs on, glimpses assault her - visions of other worlds, other lifetimes. She sees him leading one army, and her leading another, tearing against each other across salt-white plains. She sees them, lightsabers drawn, back to back against tides of enemies. She sees years spent together traveling the galaxy. In some worlds they jump from one vessel to another, as smugglers, or senators, or soldiers. Sometimes, they are Jedi. In others, they fly the ship he inherited from Han Solo.

There they are on the Falcon together, making the Kessel Run in— _ ”Ben, we’re never going to make it under 12 parsecs, it doesn’t matter!”—“Yes it does! Step on it!” _ —

Similar visions cross his mind, as he keeps his grip on the heart—she tells him the story of her life a thousand different times over - in prison cells, and in flower-strewn fields, and in starship cockpits, and in bedrooms… Many times, her stories lead to something else - her hand on his knee, or his mouth finding the crook of her shoulder.

_ Her, beneath him, legs wrapped around him, the sound of her breath rising up tremulously _ —Not fair—she thinks, across the room, her heart pounding as the same vision crosses her mind, leaving the phantom feel of him against her skin. That’s just not fair.

The heart finally tilts. It is unclear if her strength simply overwhelms him, or if he chooses to let go. The heart chooses a direction, sails right towards Rey and the humming blade of her saber meets it in mid-air.

The heart lies in two pieces on the floor. A rumbling permeates the building.

She looks up to find that he’s no longer where he had been standing a moment before. He’s run on ahead, and she knows that she has to run as well, before the citadel falls around her.

They make their escape, she with her eyes straight ahead, him looking behind, seeing if she followed. She did not. She takes a different path out, and when the Falcon launches, the Silencer is already too far to see.

 

viii

Did the bastion collapse? It certainly seems to. Though Kylo suspects that might have been another trick of the place, and Rey figures destroying the bastion in a single reality is akin to trying to kill a krayt dragon by stabbing its shadow.

It is much later, in the vastness of real space, that Rey allows herself to wonder, why were they always together? Him and her. Across time and space, they are never strangers.

He tries to force the same thought from his mind, doesn’t quite succeed, finds he can only bear the pain it gives him with the thought that in the smallness of this universe, he’s bound to see her again.


End file.
